DEEP DIVE: Laura Vanderkam on "Tranquility By Tuesday"

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0:36This is Margaret. And this is Amy. And today we're talking to our friend Laura Vanderkam. She is the author of several time management books, including the brand new Tranquility by Tuesday, Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Laura hosts the Every Weekday Morning podcast Before Breakfast, and she also co-hosts the podcast Best of Both Worlds with Sarah Hart Unger. Laura lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children. Welcome, Laura. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. We're excited to have you. We have had you on before with your podcast co-host, but I think we said at the time, way before, we now know Laura in real life, but way before we ever met you, Amy has been a Laura Vanderkamp devotee.

1:23I mean, I remember her talking about your books. I mean, you really light up Amy's, what do you call them? Neurons? The centers of my brain, my productivity centers. The productivity centers. She's into the productivity, yes. I met Laura because our first books came out at the same time in 2010. This is what, your like seventh book, Laura? How many books have you written? Something like that. I think so. Yeah, yeah. I'm working on my second book. It's going to come out just like 13 years after my first one. That's why Laura is the productivity expert and you're not, Amy. So I tip my hat to Laura.

1:59That's right. So we know you as a time management expert, productivity writer. And so what made you in this book want to turn your focus to this idea of tranquility? Yeah, well, I mean, I work with a lot of people who are productive, ambitious, you know, the people who get stuff done like Amy does. But many people, you know, kind of feel like life is just this constant to-do list, right? You know, each day is absorbed with the preparation for the next day. You get through the things you have to do, and then you do it all over again. And there's this sense sometimes that life is not as fun as it should be, that we are not necessarily appreciating the good moments that do happen.

2:42And so, I wanted to focus a little bit more on how we could make life feel sustainable and joyful, even in the midst of all the chaos that comes from having a busy life, from having a lot of responsibilities, whether that be at work, at home, or both. And, you know, how people in those busy years can make time for fun, can have the energy to handle their responsibilities and have things in life that they are genuinely looking forward to. And just so we know that we're talking to a true expert, tell us a little bit about how many kids you have, what projects you're working on, and you can mention a pet as well.

3:20A pet as well, yeah. Well, fortunately, the pet is not usually my responsibility. My husband is the one who really wanted the dog. So the dog is kind of his baby. We have five other babies. We have five children, human babies that range in age from 15 to two. So we kind of got all stages simultaneously that we're doing both potty training and driver's training simultaneously. simultaneously. So that's quite an experience. Thoughts and prayers. Yeah. Thoughts and prayers. Bless your heart, as they say in the South. Yeah. And so then, you know, professionally, I write and speak about time management, do a lot of speaking for various places, write my books, have the two podcasts.

3:58So yeah, that's what occupies my time. Also home renovation project. Let's throw that in as well. Well, that is mostly done. We still have some stuff going on. Yeah. My husband and I, during the pandemic, we did so many cliched things. I mean, we got a dog, We bought and renovated a historic house, mostly because we'd outgrown the old one when the fifth baby was born right before the pandemic started. And then we were all on top of each other for a long time. But we felt we needed to get him out of sleeping in the closet eventually. So we purchased a house. And in order to get enough space for all of us in this area, you kind of had to go with the old homes.

4:36Like nobody builds homes for families of seven anymore. So, you know, we either custom build with all that involves or bought an old place, renovated it, took about a year, moved in at the beginning of January of 2022. And, you know, there's still some boxes in the hallway. I will give you that. My time management does not extend to getting all of that done immediately. But I have high hopes that by the time 2023 rolls around, the boxes at least won't be visible anymore. So that's the goal. It seems like the idea of tranquility. I've been thinking about this a lot, that does being more productive make you more happy?

5:10I think like Gretchen Rubin would argue, yes, it does. I kind of think it does for me. But being tranquil, some other people might say, okay, if you want to be tranquil, then don't worry about renovating a house. Don't, you know, have one kid instead of five, right? One book instead of 10, right? Like, and nap more. Like, that's how to be more tranquil. But it seems like you're getting at you can have both, right? This is another approach. Yeah, this is another approach, which is that I think life is more fun when we have a lot of things that we enjoy. And I recognize that people are different.

5:42And there are some folks who really appreciate having a lot of open space. But if there are things beyond the, you know, just one thing or another that you wish to do, I do think it is possible that these things don't have to be at odds. One of my core messages of my time management work is that if you do want to raise a big family, if you do want to have a career, if you do want to make time for your own projects and hobbies, all these things can fit in the 168 hours we have each week. They can fit and some open space can fit too. But in order for that to happen, we need to be mindful of our choices.

6:25And to me, productivity is about making sure that our precious time is devoted to the things that matter to us and that we don't spend a lot of time on the things that don't matter to us. And so by that definition, I think productivity is entirely tied up in happiness because you want to spend time on the things that are joy inducing in your life. And spending a lot of time on things that are not would not meet the definition of productivity at all. I think there's something of a misnomer that it is, you know, only doing work, right? Or it is only doing chores. You know, chores and work, that's fine.

7:02We probably have to do some of them, but that's not all we have to do in life. What, when you've talked to so many people for your research for this book and other books, what would you say you see are the common themes for things that are keeping people from having time to be tranquil or time to pursue the things that really matter to them? I think it really is the fact that time keeps passing no matter what you do with it. Seems obvious, but also very profound, like, oh, right. And because of that fact, which is what makes it so easy to spend time mindlessly and to not have a good sense of where our time is going.

7:41I mean, it's as if all your money was just like burned at the end of every day. I'm not sure how many people would be very good at budgeting if that were the case. There's just, we make more mindful choices with certain things than we do with others. And, you know, and I always say, like, you start a week in 168 hours, it will have been filled with something, whether you make active choices or not, it's going to be filled with something. The question is just what? And I think that by making mindful choices about what we fill 168 hours of a week with, we can get ourselves, you know, much closer to the life we want.

8:15So it's not that there is one specific thing like, oh, everyone spends too much time on email or we're all streaming too many shows we don't care about. You know, there's all sorts of things that people manage to waste time doing. But ultimately, the biggest waste is not by asking what you want to do with your time and to be this sort of more passive recipient of what life throws at you as opposed to actively planning in what would be meaningful for yourself and the people you care about. And does research show this also seems obvious, but I want to ask the question, does research show that people who are more intentional about filling their lives with what they want, do they report getting done more of what they want than people who sort of just play it as it lays?

8:53I'm not sure exactly how that question, how we would study that question. What I do know is from Tranquility by Tuesday, I did do a research project, which is that I had 150 people follow these nine rules that are about actively planning in what you want to do in your life and making space for the things that matter to you and planning in time and making some other sort of wise time choices. And I found over the course of the nine weeks that people's time satisfaction scores, as I measured them from time to time, rose to a high degree of statistical significance. I mean, people felt quite better about their time at the end of the project than they did at the beginning.

9:35They felt they were making more progress on their professional goals. They felt they were making more progress on their personal goals. they felt they were wasting less time on things that didn't matter to them. So those were all sort of key findings that came out of the project. We are talking to Laura Vanderkam, the author of Tranquility by Tuesday, Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. And we are going to start drilling down on these rules when we get back from this break. After a long day in the summer sun, my skin needs a hydration reset. That's why I love Osea's Hyaluronic Body Serum.

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14:00And you had people try these nine rules for how long? I can't remember. Well, each week, they would learn a new rule. So over the course of nine weeks, you know, you learn a rule, you answer questions about how you plan to implement it in your life. A week later, I check back in, ask you questions about how it went. And so people would answer these questions. And then as this was going on, I was measuring them on various dimensions, You know, how much do you agree or disagree with statements like yesterday I had enough energy to handle my responsibilities or yesterday I made progress on my professional goals or yesterday I had time just for me and so on.

14:34Like that was how we did it. All right. Let's start with the first rule. First rule is give yourself a bedtime. Walk us through it. So this is a foundational rule. You know, it is very hard to make good choices, to have enough energy to handle your responsibilities if you are feeling sleep deprived. I mean, that is a very true statement, as everyone knows. Having slept well, everything feels harder. Everything seems to take twice as long. You're less happy about all of it, even if you have good things on your schedule. So we want to make sure that we're getting enough sleep. But what I've discovered over the years is that when people keep track of their time and keep track of their time for a week or so, most people are, in fact, getting enough sleep from a quantitative perspective, which is always surprising because people are like, oh, I'm not sleeping enough.

15:21I'm sleep deprived. You know, people think they sleep very little amounts on a typical night. But what's happening is that people are often even either undershooting or overshooting the amount of sleep they need. So, the beginning of the week, you know, people have slept in on Sunday morning, so they can't fall asleep Sunday night. Monday morning, they have to be up bright and early. So, they start the week with a sleep deficit. Maybe Tuesday night also has a sleep deficit. But then your body starts to force you to catch up. So, people crash on the couch while watching TV. They fall asleep while putting their kids to sleep.

15:51They sleep through their alarms. They hit snooze four times and so on it goes. And then weekends, they also spend catching up and paying off this sleep debt. And what this means is that some days you're exhausted and some days you can't maintain whatever good routines you have because your body has forced you to substitute sleep for other activities. So it's so much better to get the same amount of sleep every night, whatever amount it is you need, you get that every night. And since most adults can't really change the time they wake up in the morning because there are certain times you have to be up to go to work or to handle your family responsibilities.

16:25The only variable that can change is the time you go to bed the night before. And so I suggest people give themselves a target bedtime that is the amount of sleep you need before the time you need to wake up. So for me, I have to be up at 630 in the morning on weekdays. So since I need about seven and a half hours of sleep, my bedtime is 11 p.m. And so I always am checking in with myself sometime between 10 and 11 p.m. Does it look like I'm going to get in bed by my bedtime? Now, again, I'm adult. I don't have to stay. You know, I don't have to follow my bedtime. It's not like, you know, you're five years old and somebody is going to force you to be in bed with the lights out and start to...

17:01You don't assign your spouse to be like, I'm reading you a story and then no more glasses of water for you. It sounds nice, you know, if somebody read me a story at night, But no, that does not, in fact, happen. But the idea is that it forces you to make an active choice. Like if you have a really good reason to stay up later, go for it. But if you don't, you may as well get in bed and have a target time for that to happen every night. It's not just happening because something's happening and you're going to scroll Twitter for an extra two hours that night to keep up with it. I want to focus before we move on on the idea of tracking your time.

17:37That might not be a concept that's familiar to people. What do you mean by tracking your time? So, keeping track of where your time truly goes is one of the best ways to make sure that you are spending your time on things that you want to spend time on, right? Like if people will say to me, well, I want to spend my time better and what's the first thing I should do? I'll say, well, figure out where it's going now because if you don't know where it's going now, how do you know if you're changing the right thing? It could be that something you've never thought of is taking more time than you realize.

18:06Or it could be that things you thought were taking the time just really aren't. I mean, you don't know. And you can't make wise choices unless you have good data. And the only way to get that data is to actually keep track of your time. Which means you write down what you're doing by how long an increment. Yeah, I do this on a spreadsheet that has the days of the week across the top Monday to Sunday, half hour blocks down the left hand side 5am to 430am. I check in about three times a day. Only takes me about a minute each time. So we're talking three minutes a day, which turns out to be the same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth.

18:45So it's really not that onerous. You know, if anyone can brush their teeth, you can also do this. And you know, just check in right what I've done since the last time broad strokes, you know, if I'm working, I'll just say work, right? You know, sleep, get ready, kids, There's a lot of like random kids time, which I'm chasing somebody around dealing with somebody's needs, right? You know, I don't need to try to dial in on it. This is when I got the glass of orange juice. And then I changed the diaper. And then I did this, right? You know, it's not like that. But when you do this, you can see where your time goes.

19:15And, you know, we can see what space is available in 168 hours a week, what time is devoted to things you enjoy, what time is not and you start asking what you can do about it. And you're still doing this. I mean, all these years later, you're still learning from doing this? I am still doing this. I was just with Laura in person and I was watching her log her time. And I said, oh, you still really do that? She's like, yeah, it doesn't take very long. And I got it. I got it. No, it's, yeah, so this is gonna make me sound like a bit of a time freak. But yes, I have been doing it since April of 2015.

19:47So we're at over seven years now. But it's actually, I don't measure things much anymore. I mean, I know roughly how many hours I work. I know roughly how many hours I sleep. I'm a pretty good creature of habit for a lot of that stuff right now. It functions more as a diary. Like it's a journal that has recorded what has happened in my life. And so, I can look back on any given week from say, you know, September of 2017 and see like what happened that week. And when I see it all laid out, it actually conjures up memories in a far more detailed fashion. Because it's like, you don't just see, oh, we went apple picking.

20:22It's like, okay. And right before that, we went to this restaurant. Like, oh, yeah, I remember that now. And the whole thing comes back. It makes it, you know, memories accessible in a way that I just don't think they are in any other way. Now, if you're, you know, interested in making really cool pie charts, and want to get the exact numbers, you probably are gonna be better off with a time tracking app, or just using certain keywords that Excel can then total up for you and also create the really cool pie charts. I kind of got over the pie charts after year one of doing this. It was year one was the pie charts.

20:52Then I moved on. I like pie charts. And there's also an option to just do this for nine weeks and use it as an analytical tool for, you know, if it sounds intimidating, like, oh, my God, my new life is going to be seven years of writing down everything I do to people. There is a sort of analytical version of this where you just do it to sort of figure out, OK, what's my starting line? Yeah, you can do it for one week. That's plenty. I mean, that's what I suggest people do. I run a challenge most Januaries where I have thousands of people follow along and we track our time together for a week in January.

21:24So if people want to look into doing that, you can. You can obviously do it on your own. Start whenever you want. Just keep going for a week. If you can't do a week, that's fine. I think you can actually get a lot of data from, say, two weekdays and one weekend. Right? If you look at how you're spending your time over those three days. And here's an even little better trick to get started. Most of us actually have pretty good time recall of the previous 24 hours. Past that is entirely gone. It's one of those weird things of the human brain, but you can remember about 24 hours. So you can start, you know, this morning, write down what you did yesterday, right?

22:00And then you can do today and wow, you already have two days of data. So that's a very easy way to make this start. Can we talk a little bit about the second rule, which is sort of, I think, sort of the opposite of this, which is now that you have this time tracking and you understand how your life usually goes, to plan for what happens next? Yeah, to plan on Friday. So rule number two is to plan on Friday, which is really two things. One is just to plan. Like, let's get that first. Friday is a separate thing, although I can explain why I think Friday is a great time to do this. I think everybody needs a designated weekly planning time.

22:36Weekly, because we live our lives in weeks. Weeks are the unit of repeat in our life as a pattern, as a mathematician might refer to it. You know, if people say, well, I'm going to look at a typical day. What's a typical day? Is it Tuesday? Is it Saturday? I mean, they both occur just as often and have the same number of hours. So you need a unit of time that encompasses both Tuesday and Saturday. And a week will give you that. So a week is also, you know, a short enough time that you can pretty much see what's going to happen. Like there's not huge surprises coming in the next week, most likely that you don't know.

23:07Some, you can deal with that. But, you know, mostly we know what the next week will look like. But it's enough that it gives you enough space to put in things that don't have to happen daily in order to be important in your life. So choose a time every week, recurring time to look at the next week and ask yourself, what would you like to have happen in your life? What is important to you? I suggest people plan in three categories, career, relationships, self. So what are the most important things for your career? However, whatever that looks like for you or, you know, volunteering, if you're doing that, that can work as well.

23:41Relationships, so family, friends, what's important there? And then self, obviously, what do you want to do for your own social, emotional, spiritual, you know, physical health, right? Anything in those categories that you want to do. So figure out what's important to have happen over the next week. Figure out where those things can go. Look at what you need to do in all these categories, things that are already on your calendar or need to get on there. Look to see if there are any problems in the upcoming week that you can solve by looking at it ahead of time. You know, things that are happening at the same time, things that can't both happen at the same time, you know, things that are going to require a lot of preparation and there's not a whole lot of time immediately before them to get the preparation done.